Designing authentic assessment and The Language Assessment Process...

These readings seemed to have much in common on planning, developing, and use of authentic assessment. When designing authentic assessment you have to involve co-teachers, administrators, and parents. A group has to determine the purpose of the assessment, what do you want to build on, what objectives will be assessed, who will you share it with, what types of authentic assessments will you look at, what to look for when piloting the assessment you’ve made, who will you review the assessment with, assessment validity to the curriculum, fairness for all students, grading and reporting of the assessment, and the reliability in scoring.

I liked Shohamy and Inbar’s list of language assessment tools that can be include on page 4. Putting on a play reminded me of Abby Augustine’s study for her Master’s degree. Her students would do a short skit while her whole class told the story. I am curious if this was part of her assessment tools. Also, I thought Shohamy’s and Inbar’s article was easier reading for me, especially since it listed varies ways of administering a test for authenticity, and other tables in the article. This is something where I can quickly refer to when I have questions on authentic assessments especially on the valid and reliability part. It would be good to talk more about this in class, especially how a test can be reliable, but not valid.

As I began reading the rater training in O’Malley’s and Pierce’s chapter, on page 21, it reminded me of being one of many raters for the LKSD writing assessment that takes place in the Fall. In this type of meeting, teachers first have to practice rating papers, for I think 1/2 a day. The next 2 1/2 days involved a lot of papers. We had to rate the written assessments by following a rubric given by the school district. If there are two scores being two points or more away from each other, the two teachers had to explain why they have scored as they did, and both had to come into a consensus. We also compared the paper to another paper that was scored by an expert.